Kafka
used to say to Janouch: ‘I have nothing definitive’.
This remark by a writer sends us back to two types of behaviour, two themes,
two discourses: Hesitation, which I have just talked about, and Oscillation,
which I am going to talk about.

Although
I do not want to go into detail about this ‘case’ since it involves a close
friend, someone whom I like, esteem and admire; and also because it involves a
‘hot’ problem, what one might call an ‘image in action’, I think I should say a
word about Sollers, asking that he should be
interpreted within a serious intellectual context and not according to people’s
moods and fits of bad temper. This serious intellectual idea is precisely that
of Oscillation. Sollers, in fact, seems to give the
impression of a series of sudden palinodes which he
never explains, thus producing a kind of ‘electrical interference’ which
disconcerts and annoys intellectual opinion. What does this mean?

I should here like to make two remarks.

The
first is that, by his ‘oscillations’, it is obvious that Sollers calls into question the traditional role of the intellectual (his ‘role’, not
his ‘function’). From the moment he emerged as a social
entity (that is to say, since the end of the nineteenth century, and more precisely
since the Dreyfus case) the intellectual has been a kind of prosecuting
attorney on the side of the angels. I am naturally not trying to call
into question the need for the intellectual to act as he does. What does
interest me is the possibility of disturbing the splendidly robed figure of an
impeccably clear conscience. Now it is perfectly obvious that Sollers practises a ‘life writing’, and introduces into
this writing what Bakhtine calls a ‘carnival-like
dimension’. He suggests to us that we are entering into a phase of
deconstructing, of deconstructing not the intellectual’s action but his
‘mission’. This deconstruction can take the form of a withdrawal but also that
of a jamming, of a series of decentred statements. All that Sollers is doing is, in fact, putting into practice a remark in the People’s Daily, quoted
as an introduction to an issue of Tel Quel: ‘We
need wild devils, not tame sheep’. The jolt deliberately given to the unity of
intellectual discourse is imparted through a series of ‘happenings’, aimed at
disturbing the superego of the intellectual as an emblem of Fidelity, of the
moral Good — at the cost, obviously, of an extreme loneliness. For the
‘happening’ does not form part of that practice which I would one day like to
see analysed in a study which might be called ‘The Ethology of Intellectuals’.

The
second remark is that through a music which is, as it were, made frenzied
through Oscillation, there is in Sollers, I am
convinced, a fixed theme: writing, de­votion to writing. What is new here
is that this inflexible submission to the practice of writing (a few pages of Paradis every morning) no longer forms part
of a theory of Art for Art’s sake, or a measured and ordered commitment
(novels, poems on one side; signatures on theother);
it seems to go through a kind of radical madness of the subject, an endless series
of unending and unwearying involvements. You are present
at a mad struggle between the ‘inconclusion’ of
attitudes, these being exaggerated of course, but whose succession always
remains open (‘I have nothing definitive’) and the weight of the Image, which
invincibly tends to solidify; for the destiny of the Image is immobility. To
attack this immobility, this mortification of the image, as Sollers does is a dangerous, extremist action whose extremity inevitably recalls the
gestures of certain mystics such as El Hallaj, gestures which are in­comprehensible from any
common-sense point of view.

The
intelligentsia puts up a very strong résistance against Oscillation, while it
is very happy to accept Hesitation. Gidean hesitation,
for example, was very well tolerated, since the image remained stable: Gide
produced, as it were, the stable image of something moving. Sollers,
on the contrary, wants to stop the image solidifying. In short, everything
takes place, as it were, not on the level of content, of opinion, but on that
of images: it is the image which the community always wants to save (whatever
community it may be), because it is the image which is its vital substance and
is becoming more and more so. In its state of overdevelopment, modem society no
longer feeds on beliefs (as if did formerly)
but on images. The Sollersian scandal is
caused by the fact that Sollers attacks the Image
— seems to want to prevent, from the very outset, the formation and
stabilization of every image; he rejects the final image possible: that of
‘the-man-who-tries-every-possible-direction-before-finding-his-definitive-way’
(a noble myth of progress on life’s way, of initiation: ‘after much wondering,
my eyes opened’). Sollers becomes, as they say,
‘indefensible’.